Lara Maia-Pike Archives

Students in Year 10 are set to choose senior subjects. Those with disability miss out. Why?

It’s around this time of the year students in Year 10 across Australia attend career events and interviews to select their subjects in Year 11 and 12.

Many students feel anxious about their future choices, leading to a variety of myths circulating among students, parents, and sometimes teachers. 

Making decisions about the future while still in secondary school can be a challenge for most young people, but it can be even more complex for students in equity groups, especially students with disability.  

Transition to post-school life

Research on post-school transition and student aspirations suggests that higher socioeconomic backgrounds continue to shape aspirations towards prestigious careers and pathways. While gender and school achievement play a significant role in the decision to pursue university studies, schools’ geographic location and socioeconomic makeup can also impact the subject options available to students.

In recent years, rapid changes to school-to-work pathways have resulted in fewer stable, long-term employment opportunities for young people. There is increased pressure on young people to pursue university pathways, a trend further reinforced by government higher education policies shaping public perceptions of what success after school looks like.

Adding to the complexity is a vocational education and training (VET) system that is often undervalued, can be difficult to navigate, and is troubled by rogue providers.  

The Australian government has made significant changes to enabling programs designed to help students from equity groups access university education. However, government discourse and policies continue to portray students from equity groups as having low aspirations, while failing to adequately recognise the barriers these young people face during school years and beyond.

Many students find themselves adjusting their aspirations downward as they navigate the realities and uncertainties of secondary school. Various forms of disadvantage, like living in a remote location and having a disability can also overlap and create additional barriers to achieving educational and career aspirations.

Low aspirations or low expectations?

Research on career aspirations of students with disability in regular schools in Australia is limited. My research, which focuses on the aspirations of students with disability in general education in Queensland, found that barriers often begin much earlier—sometimes in primary school or even before students start school.

Most students in my study faced a culture of low expectations, inconsistent provision of reasonable adjustments, and inadequate consultation about their adjustment needs or their plans for life after school. These barriers significantly affected the options available to them in Year 10.

Although the selection of senior subjects may not be the most significant factor influencing most young people’s careers, limited options during the senior phase of learning can further reduce opportunities for people with disability to pursue and realise their aspirations.

Students with disability are more likely to have lower educational attainment,  experience bullying and be suspended, with almost 1 in 4 students with disability leaving school before the age of 15. Alternative pathways do exist, but they can be time-consuming and costly and may not translate into increased university participation.

The Australian Universities Accord Final Report found that students with disability have achieved parity targets, so what is the problem?

Disability advocates have criticised the Accord Report due to questionable data on disability prevalence and participation rates in higher education. More importantly, the Accord report concluded that it had done enough for students with disability.  

There is a lack of recognition in both school education and higher education policies regarding the need to invest in the educational achievement of students with disability. Despite poorer academic outcomes, students with disability continue to be left out of priority equity targets.

The flow-on effect of educational barriers

Young people with disability face ongoing barriers to finding and maintaining meaningful employment because of discrimination, a lack of employer understanding of reasonable adjustments, and inaccessible recruitment processes.

For some disabilities, like autism, the unemployment rate is almost six times higher than that of those without disability and more than double the rate for people with disability. To improve employment outcomes and economic participation of people with disability, the Australian Government awarded $22.1 million to establish Australia’s first Disability Employment Centre of Excellence earlier this year.

Re-imagining aspirations and achievement for students with disability

Education is a human right that enables all other rights. Hence, schools and universities play a vital role in improving equity, inclusion, and participation of young people with disability in the Australian economy and society.

While educational institutions in themselves cannot resolve labour market challenges or guarantee employment outcomes for students with disability, they have a moral and legal responsibility to provide access and participation of people with disability on the same basis as their peers without disability. Inclusive practices have also been shown to improve academic outcomes for students with and without disability.

For Australia to realise its aspirations of excellence and equity as set in The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, schools and universities must become genuinely inclusive. A prosperous future for Australia hinges on our collective commitment to advocate for all and ensure that no one is left behind.  

Lara Maia-Pike is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Centre for Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology. Her research focuses on student transitions and accessible practices. She is also a sessional academic in the School of Education.

How to succeed at inclusion

The first of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

This blog was put together by Lara Maia-Pike, the centre coordinator in The Centre for Inclusive Education QUT and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Thom Nevill & Glenn Savage, University of Western Australia The changing rationalities of Australian federal and national inclusive education policies

In this session the presenters discussed their recent paper focusing on developments of inclusive education in federal and national reform. They started by providing a historical and conceptual analysis of inclusive education policies, particularly during the period of 1992 to 2015.

Political rationality refers to logical ways of thinking about policy development. The methodology used in their paper involves intervention approaches to policy analysis, paying close attention to context and how meaning is constructed in policy. They identified three phases of policy development: one, standardisation, two, neo-social and three, personalisation.

Phase 1: Rationality of standardisation (1992-2005): mode of reason, clear consistent and national guidelines (for example DDA & DSE).

Phase 2: Review on the standards impact: emphasis on economic goods, producing wider education reforms (for example, the National Disability Strategy and NDIS). Banner of “education revolution”. Role in fostering economic productivity, emphasis of economic benefits of inclusion, broader productivity agenda.

Phase 3: The rise of personalisation, refers to how a service can be made more effective by tailoring to the needs of the students. Teachers can make education more inclusive and equitable by tailoring it to student needs (for example, the NCCD)

What are the implications? There is the shift from conceptualising inclusion collectively to personalisation of inclusion AND there is a responsibilisation of teachers and mothers.

Key insights:

Rationalities that underpin inclusive education policies evolved and mutated over time. Economic rationalities have rearticulated the meaning and practices of inclusive education.
Emerging and unexplored tensions between rationalities of standardisation and rationalities of personalisation.

Ilektra Spandagou, The University of Sydney Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Early Interventions; Tensions for Inclusion

The presenter explored how early intervention is constructed within the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals. The concept of early intervention is deceptively simple, often refers to early actions that could prevent future complication or need. Early intervention goes beyond education and has been critiqued because often is not distinguished from early childhood development.

Under the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) (UN, 1989) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN, 2006) early intervention is a established right for children with disability. Early intervention in International Conventions often sits within Health-related conventions. Early intervention in the Sustainable Development Goals carries policy narratives and a collective approach across different regions of the world. Findings include universal interventions, general targeted initiatives, targeted-mixed interventions (targeting disadvantages with interventions that reduce poverty) and interventions specifically targeted to disability.

Universal interventions are varied, many are integrated programs that combine health, social and educational services. In some countries early interventions look into reducing poverty.
Early interventions matter and can change the experience of disability. It sits across several fields which are often ignored from the field of inclusive education. While many of these initiatives in early intervention are necessary, the critique is that early intervention needs to be done in an inclusive way.

Kate de Bruin, Monash University Why Inclusive Education Reforms Fail in Australia: A Path to Dependency Analysis

The presenter focused on the question as to why policy reforms fail. The presenter discussed Path Dependency Theory, which is often applied in economics, and explains the resistance to change. The theory has three essential components: first, refers to initials’ conditions; second subsequent event and finally institutions reproduced it. Institutions become self-reinforced.

The initial conditions of Victorian education focused on creating a workforce to develop and sustain the economy. This led to the early critical juncture rise of Eugenics, which was enthusiastically taken by medical associations. Tools to screen for deviance and intelligence were developed, screening a large number of children. More and more children were identified, more and more assessors needed, growing exponentially, and leading to the creation of special schools. IQ tests became an intrenched mechanism leading institutions defend and reproduce segregation, through a legitimate-based mechanism. The moral argument was reconstructed by the legitimacy argument. During the 1980 categorical models were developed, where children had to meet a minimum threshold and category, and IQ tests were still used to segregate people, despite the development of conventions and legislation on the rights of people with disability regarding their education. With the development of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN, 2006), the right to inclusive education was clearly defined under the General Comment No.4, Despite human rights recognition and legal obligations to implement inclusive education, many institutions still benefit, including profit making, from segregation.